With China being a vast e-commerce market by itself, it would be hard to imagine that the Chinese e-commerce companies are looking for foreign markets to expand their wings.

However, according to a Rackspace survey, 34% of Chinese e-commerce companies plan to expand overseas, 46% already have done so and only 20% have no immediate plans to expand at all. Even amongst those with no immediate plans to expand overseas, 74% still foresee doing so in the future - with 57% expecting this to happen in the next 1-2 years and 43% in the next 3-4 years.

The managed cloud company announced these findings on 17 February-the results of a survey on cross-border ecommerce that was conducted in China.

Expanding overseas is a priority

A total of 147 respondents participated in the survey.

Among those planning to expand, time is of the essence, with 74% planning to do so in the next year. In terms of target markets 47% of those expanding overseas were targeting Europe, the UK or the US, with Australia, South America, Russia and the Middle East also targets for some.

When it comes to overseas expansion there are many focuses for IT - 'reliability' was the top priority (21%), followed by 'user experience' (19%) and third was 'working with a supplier from my home market that I know well' (16%).

Those currently planning to expand overseas want to use managed cloud services - with 40% planning to outsource their overseas hosting to local, global or domestic cloud providers, Rackspace said in a statement.

For companies that had expanded overseas, the biggest IT challenge was support. Technical support was ranked as 'very important' by 61% of respondents when setting up infrastructure and by 53% of respondents when expanding overseas.

"When it comes to overseas expansion, it seems many Chinese companies are seeing the value of utilizing local support and finding a provider who understands the global marketplace," said Adam McCarthy, Director & General Manager for Asia at Rackspace. "With so many of today's businesses keen to become global it only makes sense that the infrastructure and support they use is global too. At Rackspace we have been focused on addressing this need in the market, developing our Fanatical Support® offering and ensuring our customers benefit from truly global support teams to help them succeed in any market."

The survey was conducted at the Cross Border E-Commerce Conference & Exhibition, which took place November 27-28th 2014 in Shanghai. Respondents were surveyed in one-on-one interviews by Rackspace representatives.